Exploration geologist Daniel Babin said he hopes to one day become the Neil DeGrasse Tyson of rocks. “I just want to be hanging out of the side of a helicopter with a panorama, helping people discover the wonder that is the world below us,” Babin said as he chatted with me virtually from a research vessel in an undisclosed location for an undisclosed company. “(Earth) is just as amazing as space. We have just had worse marketing,” he laughed.
The adventurer and geology influencer has gained more than 150,000 Instagram followers for his educational geology and travel reels and posts. He started creating content in 2015 but got serious with it in 2022, when his girlfriend at the time told him to film the explanations about rocks he gave her as they hiked through Switzerland. She suggested posting content every Tuesday at 10 a.m. and seeing if it resonated.
“Four weeks later, and four posts later, I had a video that did 600,000 views and brought me 30,000 followers,” he recalls. His platform, @rockdocdan has only taken off from there.
A Louisiana native, Babin attended Louisiana State University as an undergraduate. He started off studying engineering, but shifted to geology after seeing an advertisement for a field camp in Colorado where attendees got to explore the area and make maps for six weeks.
“That’s my stuff,” he thought. “I studied geology because I like to play outside. I think a lot of people end up in that circumstance,” he half-joked.
Upon graduation, he moved to New York and pursued a doctorate, studying “the history of Earth’s climate, oceans, and ice ages, preserved in marine sediments.”
“I was studying seafloor sediments from South Africa,” he said of his doctorate from Columbia University. He then completed a post-doctoral degree from the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. Now, he’s in mineral exploration. “I can’t legally say anything about where I am or the organization I’m working with,” he said.
But he did say he is passionate about his work and passionate about paleoclimatology. And that this passion is what has fueled his following.
“If you like attention, and there is something out there that you are passionate about – the more specific the better – there is someone out there who will enjoy it,” Babin said.
His voice, graphics, and writing have been featured on ABC, BBC, NASA, the American Geophysical Union, and the International Ocean Discovery Program.
Outside of social media, he shares his passion via geology-focused tours of New York’s Central Park.
“It’s a bit of a community-building activity,” he said.
He hopes to get even more into geo-tourism and recently attended a retreat in Tulum, Mexico, which combined geology and free diving. Attendees dove to examine underwater rocks.
“You’re getting to learn about the history and mechanisms that made the landscape that you’re falling so in love with,” he said.
So what’s Babin’s next adventure? He’d like to host more trips, but at the moment, he’s focused on work.
“The critical minerals space,” he said, “people are just crazed about it. And politically, it’s in sort of a favorable position.”